Apron Strings

Navigating Food and Family in France, Italy, and China

By: Jan Wong

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Paperback | 12 September 2017

At a Glance

Paperback
384 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3

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Shortlisted, 2018 Taste Canada Awards and 2018 Writers'' Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
Longlisted, 2018 RBC Taylor Prize

Jan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn''t keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn''t pass up.

On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing first-hand how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures. In southeast France, they move in with a family sheltering undocumented migrants. From Bernadette, the housekeeper, they learn classic French family fare such as blanquette de veau. In a hamlet in the heart of Italy''s Slow Food country, the villagers teach them without fuss or fanfare how to make authentic spaghetti alle vongole and a proper risotto with leeks. In Shanghai, they home-cook firecracker chicken and scallion pancakes with the nouveaux riches and their migrant maids, who comprise one of the biggest demographic shift in world history. Along the way, mother and son explore their sometimes-fraught relationship, uniting — and occasionally clashing — over their mutual love of cooking.

A memoir about family, an exploration of the globalization of food cultures, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, Apron Strings is complex, unpredictable, and unexpectedly hilarious.

Industry Reviews

"Jan Wong takes us on a trip through three of the world's greatest cuisines to learn the secrets of their foods, as well as the civilizations-past and present-that underlies what they eat. From a farm family in France coping with globalization to the stubborn traditions of central Italy and the cultural confusion of today's China, we meet the families and people behind the dishes-and learn how to make them as well. A wonderful story about Jan's own efforts to bond with her son, Apron Strings is what we have come to expect from Jan Wong: funny, insightful, and brutally honest." -- Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China
"For foodies like me, Jan's book will be irresistible, but the fact is that anyone would love this book. Apron Strings is one of the most appealing, charming, loveable books I've read in years." -- Stevie Cameron, author of On the Take
"Apron strings may be for foodies, but Jan Wong's Apron Strings is for everyone." -- Uwera Nina Ntanganzwa * The Brunswickan *
"Apron Strings is dense in food history, customs, traditions and all the contrasts in between from school systems, familial roles and even water consumption." -- Jules Torti * Alphabet Soup *

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